Schram: Quit winging it, fly home, Putin

Putin’s generals, fearing the career-ending brutality of their ruler’s wrath, deceived him about the extent of their invasion’s failure, according to U.S. officials. Just as Putin had been deceiving his people about what his invasion was all about from the outset. So things came full circle in Putin’s inner circle.

As Putin began realizing that his ground invasion wasn’t working, his troops began indiscriminately targeting with artillery, rockets and bombs Ukraine’s innocent civilians. He was, of course, killing and maiming and terrorizing the same women, children, elderly and infirm whom he had told his fellow Russians he wanted to liberate because Ukrainians are as Russian as they were. He made up a lie, saying he was liberating Ukrainians from a government run by fictional neo-Nazis.

Now Putin has his forces circling back around for a second, face-saving try at invading Ukraine. His shamed and stalled ground forces north of Kyiv have been pulled back to redeploy. Putin wants to at least liberate the Donbas region by making it clearly independent and, mainly, very loyal to his Russia. But Putin’s innermost objectives are not entirely clear — probably not even to his own inner circle, which now appears more like a vicious circle.

Longtime observers believe that what the Russian dictator really wanted most was to re-create the power-and-glory — plus the fear-and-glory — that young Vladimir Putin most loved about old Joe Stalin’s Soviet Empire. Instead, Putin discovered that his feared army got massively kicked and killed by little old Ukraine — so badly that his generals conned him rather than telling him the truth that the rest of the world was seeing on its news screens.

The real reason Russia invaded Ukraine, of course, has nothing to do with Nazis or liberation. Or Ukraine’s Nobel-deserving Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Putin’s inner volcano has been erupting ever since 2014, when he became obsessed that Kyiv was way-too publicly dissing Russia.

As Russia’s generals and intel chiefs take off on their second, more carefully calculated, military invasion of Ukraine, Putin feels he at least has one massive force under his secure control: Russia’s people.

A solid majority once believed their dictator-president’s Big Lie about Nazis ruling Ukraine. But online reality has begun to seep through to Russia’s masses. More and more, Russians are realizing Putin’s slaughter of Ukraine.

Putin also now knows he vastly underestimated the power of sanctions imposed by America, NATO and others. Russia’s people, isolated from a prosperous global economy, will soon be suffering.

Putin can bash Ukraine until, as Winston Churchill once put it, he makes the rubble bounce. But he cannot win. And he may lose everything, once ordinary Russians become fed up at the global shame and economic suffering that will be Putin’s legacy.

That’s why Putin, being scheming smart, may soon get it: His smartest move now is to declare victory and get out of Ukraine.